Sad, sad news: Maurice Sendak, the prolific children's writer and illustrator best-known as the author of the peerless Where the Wild Things Are, has died at the age of 83. In person fiercely private, with an (apparently merited) reputation for cantankerousness, Sendak was born in Brooklyn in 1928 to a family of Polish Jews. His own childhood was famously difficult – raised in a claustrophobic, inward-peering immigrant community, he was also beset by illness – but through his work, in which he mined and exploited his memories of that time to produce his gloriously unsanitised picture books, he brightened the lives of children around the globe.

Published in 1963, sales of Where the Wild Things Are now stand at around the 17m mark; through Max – fierce and furious, escaping into the wilderness of his imagination to wrestle his monsters before coming back down to Earth to find his supper waiting, "still hot" – Sendak achieved that rare thing in children's literature: a synonymity with the state of childhood itself; a place in our collective consciousness.

A long-time friend of the artist, his recollections were personal and affectionate – and highly illuminating. "Maurice's love of people is great and wide," he says,

as is his interest in their doings – heroic, monstrous, and everything in between. His need for their company is more circumscribed. He will invoke one of his favourite poets, Emily Dickinson, tutelary divinity of reclusiveness. "What I learned from her," he told me, "is, 'Don't open the door, don't let them in!' " Then he enacts an imagined domestic drama from the Dickinson home in Amherst, doing all the characters: "'Emily, Emily, you promised you'd come for a snow ride with us! What are you doing sulking upstairs?' 'Don't listen, don't care, don't let them in!' And she stayed upstairs. She didn't listen to them. She kept the world OUT," he concludes, full of admiration.

Yet sociable Mozart and Keats are heroes as well. Sendak in hiding attracts an ever-expanding army of friends. I'm forever meeting people who know him, who have visited him, who have worked or corresponded with him.

Also fascinating, from a different angle, is this conversation between Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers. The 2009 film of Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Jonze – and the accompanying book-of-the-film-of-the-book by Eggers – triggered another wave of interest in the story for adults who'd grown up with it; the pairs' remembrances of Sendak's input into the process of turning the 338-word book into a feature-length movie make for engrossing reading. "I was struck by how strong he was," said Eggers. "He must have been 76 when we met him, but he was razor-sharp and very funny. He's a hilarious guy, incredibly vibrant. We walked in, and he showed us some of his Disney collection."

Sendak gave one of his last interviews to the Guardian's Emma Brockes last autumn. On typically uproarious form, he inveighed against everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Roald Dahl and, perhaps most memorably, Salman Rushdie, whom he impugned with poetic verve: "That flaccid fuckhead. He was detestable. I called up the Ayatollah, nobody knows that." He ended, though, on a more reflective note, describing his search for a "yummy death". William Blake, he said, set the standard, "jumping up from his death bed at the last minute to start singing. 'A happy death,' says Sendak. 'It can be done'". Here's hoping. Please leave your tributes below.